Stanley Greene

For the last 25 years,Stanley Greene (New York, 1949) bore witness to births of new dawns, rising and falling empires, invasions of countries, liberation of others, mass migrations, deportations, displacements, famines, conflicts, wars and destruction. He worked on the five continents trying to document the human condition. “Sometimes I wonder if societies just lust for tragedies.”

As a teenager, he was a member of the Black Panthers, an anti-Vietnam War activist and later a founding member of SF Camerawork, an exhibition space for avant-garde photography in San Francisco.

Stanley studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and at the Image Works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An encounter with W. Eugene Smith turned his energies to photojournalism. Stanley began photographing for magazines and worked as temporary staff photographer for the New York Newsday.

In 1986 he moved to Paris and, by chance, he was on hand to record the fall of the Berlin Wall, making him a much-sought-after photojournalist. While working for the Paris-based photo agency Agence Vu in October 1993, he was trapped and almost killed in the White House in Moscow during a coup attempt against President Boris Yeltsin.

Stanley has covered the war-torn countries Nagorno-Karabakh, Iraq, Somalia, Croatia, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, amongst others. He’s won numerous awards, including five World Press Photo Award and the Eugene Smith Humanistic Grant. In 2013, Stanley was awarded the Aftermath Grant for his project “The Rise of Islam in the Caucasus.”

He made a great impression with the photo book “Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2003“, published by Trolley. Also successful is “Black Passport”, photographed and lived by Stanley, compiled by Teun van der Heijden, was published in 2009 and published by Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam.

In the summer of 2010, to mark the fifth commemoration of Hurricane Katrina, Stanley exhibited images of Katrina’s devastation and the aftermath in a truck-exhibition that drove from Houston to New Orleans in collaboration with Kadir van Lohuizen.

Stanley continues to cover important world events and recently followed the trail of electronic waste to Nigeria, India, China and Pakistan; a project realized with the support of the Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography, GEO France and exhibited at the international photojournalism festival Visa pour l’Image 2012.

Stanley’s black and white silver prints are printed by Nathalie Lopparelli’s Atelier Fenêtre sur Cour, in Paris. In her long career, Nathalie has printed for Brassaï, William Klein, Gérard Rondeau, was the personal printer of Sébastiao Salgado and has worked extensively for Magnum.